Fortune-tellers, mediums and spiritual healers marched to Downing Street on Friday, to deliver a petition to the Prime Minister, and to protest against new laws they fear will lead to them being “persecuted and prosecuted”, since the new rules will shift the responsibility of proving they are not frauds from the prosecutors and onto themselves.
Organizers claimed that replacing the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 with new consumer protection regulations will remove key legal protection for genuine mediums.
They believe that sceptics may bring malicious prosecutions, to force spiritualists to prove in court that they can really heal people, see into the future or talk to the dead.
Psychics also fear that they will have to give disclaimers describing their services as entertainment or as scientific experiments with unpredictable results.
Carole McEntee-Taylor, a healer who co-founded the Spiritual Workers Association said:
If I’m giving a healing to someone, I don’t want to have to stand there and say I don’t believe in what I’m doing
By repealing the Act, the onus will go round the other way and we will have to prove we are genuine
The government said the new regulations form part of a European Union directive that is meant to harmonize unfair trading laws across the EU, and will introduce a ban on traders “treating consumers unfairly”.
The British Humanist Association, a charity which campaigns against religion and supernatural beliefs, said stricter regulations were overdue because the current laws don’t work.
Chief Executive Hanne Stinson commented:
It is misleading for spiritualists to claim that, as religious practitioners they should not be regulated under consumer laws
The Psychic industry is huge and lucrative and it exploits some very vulnerable, and some very gullible, people with claims for which there is no scientific evidence.
Posted by Jonathan in Miscellaneous